Hi there, and welcome to 8 Minute Lives. In the summer of 1429, an old woman was living in a convent outside Paris. She'd been there for eleven years, sheltering from a civil war that had torn France apart, and in all that time she had published nothing. She was in her mid-sixties, which by medieval standards made her ancient, and her long, remarkable career seemed to be over. Then news arrived that a teenage peasant girl in armour had just led the French army to victory at Orléans. And the old woman picked up her pen one last time, and wrote one of the earliest poems ever composed about Joan of Arc — while Joan was still alive, still winning, about two years before her execution. The woman was Christine de Pizan. And to understand why that moment mattered so much to her, you have to understand what she'd spent her whole life arguing: that women were capable of far more than her world was willing to admit. Christine was born in Venice around 1364, and she was raised at the French royal court in Paris. Her father, Tommaso da Pizzano, was a physician and astrologer — in the fourteenth century those were respectable, overlapping professions — and he was so good at it that King Charles the Fifth of France recruited him personally. So Christine grew up inside the royal court, surrounded by scholars, and crucially, close to the king's library, one of the finest collections of books in the Western world. And here's the first stroke of luck in her life. Her father believed girls should be educated. Her mother, by Christine's own account, disagreed, thinking a girl should stick to spinning and household skills. Her father won that argument. Christine learned to read, she learned French and Italian, some Latin, and she devoured history, poetry, and philosophy. Almost no girl in fourteenth-century Europe got an education like that. At fifteen she was married to Étienne du Castel, a young royal secretary. And by her own testimony — which we should trust, because she wrote about it with real tenderness — the marriage was genuinely happy. He supported her studies. They had three children. Life was comfortable and secure. Then, over the space of a few years, everything collapsed. The old king died, and with him went her father's position and salary. Her father died not long after. And then, in 1390, the plague swept through and killed Étienne. Christine was twenty-five years old, a widow with three children, her mother, and a niece to support. And almost no money. What she discovered next radicalised her, in a quiet, fourteenth-century way. As a widow, she had to untangle her husband's estate — and she was cheated at nearly every turn. She spent years dragging lawsuits through the courts to recover money that was owed to her, and she later wrote about how men treated a woman alone: dismissed, patronised, preyed upon. She said that fortune had, in effect, turned her into a man — because she now had to do everything a man did, in a world built to stop her. Most widows in her position would have remarried, or entered a convent. Christine did something almost without precedent. She decided to earn her living by writing. Now, this is a genuinely strange career choice for the 1390s. There was no publishing industry. Printing hadn't been invented yet. Every book was copied by hand. A writer survived on patronage — you wrote something beautiful, presented it to a duke or a queen, and hoped for a gift in return. Christine started with love poems, ballads, many of them shot through with her grief for Étienne, and they found an audience. The great patrons of France — including the Duke of Berry, the Duke of Burgundy, and Queen Isabeau — began commissioning her work. And Christine didn't just write. She ran what was effectively a small production studio, working closely with scribes and illuminators — including, scholars believe, a woman artist she praised by name, Anastasia — to produce gorgeous manuscripts. There's a famous illustration of Christine presenting an enormous collected volume of her works to the Queen of France, both women surrounded by ladies-in-waiting, with the author at the center of the picture. She is often called Europe's first professional woman of letters, and the title fits: writing was how she paid the bills, for decades. Then, around 1401, she picked a fight that made her famous. The most celebrated poem in France at the time was the Romance of the Rose, a long allegory about love, and its second half — written by Jean de Meun — included sharply misogynistic commentary about women: that they were deceitful, greedy, and untrustworthy. This was standard stuff. Educated men had been recycling these jokes since antiquity, and everyone treated the poem as untouchable. Christine attacked it. In open letters that circulated around Paris, she argued that the poem was crude, that its portrayal of women was slander, and that its author's fame didn't excuse it. Prominent male scholars fired back, some of them condescending, some genuinely angry. The exchange became known as the Quarrel of the Rose, and it's often described as an early debate in European literary history about how literature portrays women — with a woman leading one side. Christine made copies of the correspondence and sent them to the queen. She understood publicity perfectly. Out of that fight came her masterpiece. Around 1405 she wrote The Book of the City of Ladies. It opens with Christine sitting in her study, depressed, having just read yet another learned book explaining that women are wicked by nature. She wonders, painfully, why so many great men would say it if it weren't true. And then three crowned figures appear — Reason, Rectitude, and Justice — and instruct her to build a city: an allegorical fortress constructed entirely from the stories of great women. Warriors, queens, inventors, scholars, saints. Each life is a stone in the wall. The message is simple and, for 1405, quietly explosive: the record of what women have actually done disproves what men keep writing about them. She followed it with a practical sequel offering advice to real women, from princesses down to labourers' wives. And she kept widening her range — a biography of King Charles the Fifth, treatises on politics and peace, and even a manual on warfare and military strategy, which soldiers genuinely used. A woman writing the standard book on siege tactics. Christine simply refused to accept that any subject was closed to her. But France was disintegrating around her. The king was intermittently insane, rival royal factions slid into assassination and civil war, and in 1418 one faction seized Paris in a massacre. Christine fled to the convent at Poissy, where her daughter was a nun. And there she fell silent — until Joan of Arc, in 1429, when she wrote that final jubilant poem in praise of Joan. A girl, she marvelled, had done what no man could do. It must have felt like the City of Ladies had come to life. Christine died soon after, probably in 1430, before Joan's execution in 1431. For centuries she was largely forgotten. Then twentieth-century scholars rediscovered her, and she's now read as something like the first feminist writer in European history. Whether that label fits a medieval Christian widow is debatable. What isn't debatable is this: when catastrophe took everything from her, Christine de Pizan built a life — and a city — out of words. And six hundred years later, the walls are still standing.
